Watch out in the trees for a camouflaged One-eyed Purple Eater still alive in this pre-1958 neighborhood. That song was enough to make us like the Beetles' music. But after reading earlier posts about Beetles song lyrics, I now suspect that we all missed a lot of secret code in those lyrics. Now I Think of "one-eyed"as a reference to a certain male organ. And I Think of "People Eater" as a reference to a certain sexual activity act. And I Think of "Purple" as a reference to a certain lostness in passion.Or was it just a goofy song???

Notice the passion with which these white people attack their European instruments. It is not seizures that they are having. They are merely attempting to get their "mojos" filtering, not so unlike Mr. Jack Benny's boy "Rochester" singing a smokin' "L.S.M.F.T."

Purple must be a new Obama Homeland Security color code picked by Michelle and the girls.Its use comes right after Netanyahu first strikes the Persian Empire's Nuclear umbrella. It stands for "last one into the shelter is a Purple egg".

The glory of all the colors is red. Should you not want to live forever, because there is red? There is also blue, with all it's complicated variations and I have a complicated relationship with blue. It depends on the blue But still, I would like to live forever because of blue. Yellow, I have done things for yellow. I have dropped everything and proceeded toward yellow. Green is everywhere. Orange is important. We've already spoken of purple. In between all these things there are infinite gradations. I won't belabor them, but really. Please think about it. Color alone is reason to live.

Blood in the veins returning to refresh its red, oxygenated, color reminds men of the delicate blood flow we are made from. Women have accepted this as part of Life ( which they create), but us men don't want to think about our dependence on a mere blood circulatory system? Supermen don't bleed.

Hmm... Because pink is for girls, blue is for boys, and purple is a mixture of the two?

But there's eggplant. It's purple and masculine.

I think it has to do with the value of the color. A light red (pink), light purple, and powder blue all seem feminine. I might be uncomfortable wearing them, whereas dark versions of those colors are sitting in my wardrobe.

I, however, as a man am an exception to the rule: I love purple. In fact, I wear a purple hat and a purple scarf. Men leave me alone while women can't seem to keep their hands off me. That is, as long as I wear the hat and scarf.

I tire of these silly "real men don't..." generalizations. Real men used to be proud of having a developed aesthetic sensibility. But the crass, lowbrow, defensive masculinity of the U S of A took care of that. You needn't be a "sissy" to care about the visual world.

I have my juliet balcony door open right now and I am hearing many sounds of the city. People walking by singing, car alarms, car radios, car horns, cars hitting potholes, car accidents which I hear daily, lovers fighting, buses rolling by. There goes another car alarm.

I am turning purple listening to the spin on my local ABC station about the "Stimulus Agreement." I shut it off to avoid the lies.

Sorry to ruin the discussion of a cool picture.

(If I did what you did to your picture, rotated it 8.5 degrees, and stuck a label "tree" in Harrington typeface on it, would it be derivative and could I sell it with my name on it legally? Just asking.)

Palladian: Real men used to be proud of having a developed aesthetic sensibility. But the crass, lowbrow, defensive masculinity of the U S of A took care of that. You needn't be a "sissy" to care about the visual world.

It sure seems to help though.

And if any straight person had your attitude towards my lack of interest in sports...

To men there are three major color groups: blonde, brunette and redhead. Then there are so many variations and shades that do truly make life worth living.And add to that the asian black/brunette. My favorite is a strawberry blonde, which my granddaughter has in a perfect hue, like a young Anne Margaret. I also like silver/white on a beautiful woman.The purples are only for Halloween costumes.

I am a big pooftah and I know tons about sports. Love sports. Love the statistics in sports.

I don't go to Vail. All of my vacation spots are districtly east coast and on the ocean. Southern Coast of Maine, The Cape and Fire Island. I love the sound of the ocean. I love the smell of the ocean. I love the fucking ocean. I love to walk on the beach at dusk while the wind blows on my taut hairless pecs. The ocean is so magnificent. If the ocean was a guy I would fuck it.

Snowe and Collins are unbeatable in Maine. The southern coast of Maine where the majority of the population live are incredibly liberal and if those two senators weren't in they spots would go to democrats.

They are also two of the most popular senators in the country. I think like over 70% of the state of Maine approves of them. They will not go anywhere.

I read that those two ladies and Specter are the most powerful people in Washington today.

She's terribly nice, also. She's my very favorite liberal Senator. Susan Collins is kind of like that woman on Seinfeld who looked okay in one light and frightening in other lights. Speaking of Seinfeld:

Not that there's anything wrong with that... Honestly, I don't know what's wrong with you gay fellas! Of course, there's plenty of things wrong with Suze Orman. She wasted almost a minute of airtime the last time I saw her with this vaporous self-impressed stream of hot air that boiled down to what a normal person would have said in answer to the question: "yes." TV people suck.

I think Susan Collins is pretty attractive too. I saw her on tv today and she looked very nice. Olympia Snowe looks great with the black hair. I haven't seen Susan Collins ever look bad. Kay Bailey Hutchinson is attractive too.

National Velvet is on TCM. Liz Taylor was a beautiful child. Oh and there's the ocean. Love that ocean.

Real men used to be proud of having a developed aesthetic sensibility. But the crass, lowbrow, defensive masculinity of the U S of A took care of that. You needn't be a "sissy" to care about the visual world.

The lowbrow, defensive masculinity of the U S of A? As opposed to all those other countries in the world where men routinely admire each others' asses?

The word "purple" comes to us from the Greek (via the usual circuitous route through Latin and Old English) πορφύραν, porphura, of the mollusk that produced the only bright, deep, color-fast purple dye available in the world until the mid-nineteenth century. Walk through any art museum and you'll see no bright purple color in any painting produced before then. The color to which the name "purple" referred has changed many times depending on the time period and the culture being discussed. The "Prince" sort of purple that most people think of is not the color of the purple of antiquity. The ancient purple, Tyrian purple, is more akin to the color of a fresh Welch's grape juice stain on a white cotton shirt, only much more intense. Tyrian purple is made from the fresh mucous secretion of a big sea snail that is variously known as Murex brandaris and Haustellum brandaris. It requires harvesting and killing 10,000 of these gastropods to produce one gram of the dye, hence the astronomical price and rarity of the color.

I have a sample of the dye, about 50 milligrams, which cost me nearly two hundred dollars. To put that in perspective, an extra strength Tylenol pill contains 500 milligrams of Acetaminophen alone, not counting the weight of the other ingredients.

As I said, there was no other bright, color-fast purple dye or pigment available to artists until the 19th century. The use of Tyrian purple pretty much died out by the 11th century in the West. Artists could mix purple hues by glazing blue pigments with red pigments, but as there were only three bright red pigments available to artists until the 19th century, two [1; 2] of which faded rapidly and one of which is both too opaque and too orange to actually produce a mixed purple, not many artists bothered.

What changed everything (and by extension, the world as we know it) was W.H. Perkin's discovery and production of the world's first synthetic organic dye: 3-amino-2,±9-dimethyl-5-phenyl-7-(p-tolylamino)phenazinium acetate, or Mauveine, later known as the color mauve. Perkin was, on a challenge from one of his professors, trying to synthesize quinine and failed, producing a black lump. While he was trying to clean the lump out of his flask, he discovered that a portion of the lump dissolved in alcohol and produced a bright purple. Voilà! The first aniline dye, which changed not only the world of fashion and art, but as I said before, changed the entire world. It was through Perkin's discovery and subsequent manufacture of Mauveine and the resulting proliferation of aniline dye research and industry that the first antimicrobial drugs, the sulfonamides (the early examples of which were dye-based) were invented. Not to mention Tylenol, Polyurethane and the whole synthetic chemical industry.

Not bad for a chemical that started as an accident involving a substance (aniline, phenylamine) that stinks of rotting fish. An apt smell for the chemical that was responsible for the rebirth of purple in the modern world, the olfactory memory across the millennia of those vast piles of dead, rotting mollusks that yielded the color of Emperors.

I am watching Jimmy Kimmel (don't ask) and he actually made a joke about the President (and the strange McDonald's student worker) as well as one about both Mrs. Obama and the President in a Japanese show -- "Yes we can!" (?)

Speaking of Japan my neighbor was in Japan and everywhere he went Japanese people yelled Yes We Can at him...I guess because he is an American. He said this lasted an entire week. Restaurants, stores, on the street, everywhere, Yes We Can. How scarey.

Sex is God's joke on humanity. To consider oneself an aesthete and to have go thru life obsessed by men's butts--the internal contradictions have got to wear you down....Just as a sidebar, do gays consider the scrotum attractive? I can see where some butts are less hairy than others but is it even possible to idealize the scrotum? Every part of a woman's external body can be idealized and eroticized, but there's not much you can do with a wrinkly ball sack. Also the scrotum is kind of purplish which may explain the male antipathy to the color purple.

Althouse: In the 1950s, at least in my New England part of the US, men's wearing purple was a flag. It signaled (or was said to signal) that one was gay and cruising.

That put rather a damper on hetero men's willingness to wear the color.

That flag--if indeed it actually was one--eventually went away, but the hetero view of it has a long tail.

I love purple, but don't wear it. Possibly for the above reason, but more likely that it really doesn't look great with my red hair and pale complexion. Other colors--blues, greens, beiges, and browns--seem to draw more favorable attention and commentary.

And the tree said, "When I am old I shall wear purple. And a big-ass red hat, so I can gather with other purple-wearing trees who prefer big-ass red hats, and we can lunch together. And the other trees will stare at us, with our purple clothes and our big-ass red hats, and marvel..."

"Sex is God's joke on humanity. To consider oneself an aesthete and to have go thru life obsessed by men's butts--the internal contradictions have got to wear you down"

You imply contradiction where there is none. Ask the ancient Greeks, their copyists the ancient Romans, or perhaps Michelangelo of the "contradiction" of appreciation of aesthetics and the male body. If that were possible, they might laugh at you.

Every part of a woman's external body can be idealized and eroticized,"

Huh. I like how you've decided that your particular erotic attraction to the female body serves as a universal truth of the superiority of the eternal feminine. Hate to tell you, but just because you like tits and tail doesn't make the female form any more perfect than the male form.

And have you looked at a harshly-lit pussy? Not really a thing of beauty.

"...but there's not much you can do with a wrinkly ball sack."

Really? Obviously we've never slept together...

"Also the scrotum is kind of purplish which may explain the male antipathy to the color purple."

Upon deeper thought on the subject, I think it is fair to eliminate elbows as an object of erotic consideration. I have never heard of anyone having an elbow fetish. Girls can have cute knees, i.e. the bee's knees, but elbows are difficult to eroticize...Are there gays with foot fetishes, or an attraction to a slender, graceful neck, or to a trim ankle, or to the silkiness of the inner thigh. I get the sense that straights find more rhythmns and turns in their dance than do gays--the difference between a minuet and a Funky Broadway. You see the paradox: the aesthetes do the funky Broadway and the heteros bow, and curtsey, and circle and stand......I think when men use the expression "blue balls" they actually mean purple balls. As noted earlier, this is why they have antipathy to this discolored color, and, also, perhaps why women are attracted to it.....I'm wrong about most things, and these observations are just meant to increase, however marginally, the world's share of ignorance and misinformation....And so to bed.

You imply contradiction where there is none. Ask the ancient Greeks, their copyists the ancient Romans

Well I would, but they've been dead for thousands of years. Besides, for every enlightened Greek or Roman who extolled the virtues of masculine beauty you had a thousand whose idea of great art was dick jokes. That's why the plays were so famously smutty.

or perhaps Michelangelo of the "contradiction" of appreciation of aesthetics and the male body.

I have no doubt Michelangelo appreciated the beauty of the male body, considering the man was as gay as a picnic basket. I don't see how that's a commentary on the aesthetics of the time.

My grandmother used to say she could pick my father out of a USNA marching formation when they turned a corner, because he had the biggest rear end (he was a sprinter). No one quizzed her about checking out all the young men.

It looks like they could have made murky purple with groundup porphyry.

To imitate Susan Collins speech pattern, I push my tongue forward to the front of my mouth so that it takes up all available space, then over enunciate every single syllable with equal emphasis and s...l...o...w e...v...e...r...y...t...h...i...n...g w...a..y d...o...w...n. This provokes your impulse to punch me in the face.

"Byzantine historians distinguish two sorts of emperors: those who won power through a coup and those "born in the purple". These porphyrogénnētoi were born to the imperial family in the Porphýra, the purple porphyry-veneered delivery room in the Great Palace"